Good Tomato, Moonparty, Mars

Yesterday morning I was very diligent and arrived at the library not much after nine. The MA thesis I had been looking at the previous day was there waiting for me in its tenuous hiding place. When I'd left the day before, the thesis room had already been locked, and I didn't want to put the thesis on the reshelving cart because I was going to come back and use it right away. I explained this to the grim-faced library and she asked me what time I was planning on coming tomorrow. "Nine," I said, honorably promising myself to keep this resolve. So she just shoved it on the end of one of the shelves, with a ghost of a smile. I smiled back and arrived promptly to take it up again this morning.

The thesis is only 25 pages long, but they are A4 pages densely packed with tiny characters. By the end of the morning, I was only up to page 10, but it was useful stuff. Mostly just a research paper--I'm not even sure if one cites MA theses in a dissertation; I'll have to check--but chockful of good sources to check into and also helps me get a better idea of the background scene and cast of characters in Southern Song Shiji studies, which really comes in handy because it had been rather nebulous to me before.

After the library closed at noon, I did some browsing in the Hanxue bookstore, looking for some of the sources I'd been interested in from the dissertation. Hard to find. I'm going to have to visit a much bigger bookstore, I'm afraid. But I did pick up a few things, also in relation to preparing for classes next week.

When I got home, I parked my bike in the little underground bike parking garage/market. This is the market that occasioned such great scorn in me during my first days here, since it looks like a convenience store set up in a parking garage: unappetizing shelves set against dark concrete. However, it has gradually grown on me. The people are always friendly to me and give me nice smiles when I go to and fro to fetch my bike. So I decided to try one of their tomatoes. I picked one out and the woman weighed it. It cost about six cents.

I sliced some with my cheapo but super-sharp knife (you can always test a knife's sharpness by slicing tomatoes), and it looked great inside, really red and ripe and juicy. I had some sliced into my grilled cheese sandwich, and some plain with salt (not sugar) which is Colin's way of eating good tomatoes. I thought of him and of Mr. Stripey, the New Jersey tomato plant that moved with us in Chicago, filling up most of our backseat. Colin informs me that Mr. Stripey made a lovely big heirloom tomato which he just ate, reporting that it was quite delicious. Ah, news from home. But this tomato had nothing to be ashamed of either. It may not have that fancy heirloom look, but it definitely had an heirloom taste. And can't beat the price. Covered with nasty chemicals no doubt but if I spend too much time thinking like that I will starve.

The rest of the afternoon I spent resting and doing small household tasks. I cleaned out the turtle tank, managing to break the glass bottle of vinegar in the process. Stupid glass bottles (gnashes teeth). And when you break something on the hard marble floor of a bathroom, of course glass goes everywhere. I didn't cut myself but I was mighty annoyed. You better appreciate it, you dumb turtles. (Queequeg continues to deny his semi-aquatic nature by drying up on the plate whenever possible. It is actually kind of fun dumping him back in the water once in a while. He is so silly and surprised. What? You sneaked up on me? How could that have happened? Yojo only creeps up onto the plate when he's really sure I'm not looking, and NEVER falls asleep up there.)

It being the very day of the mid-autumn festival, I decide to accept the invitation of one of my fellow FBers to go to a mooncake party at her apartment. It was to start at 9 but I went early because I hadn't been there before and I thought it might be fun to look around. I have decided to shamelessly take pictures in the subway whenever there is something to see, so here is the Great Wall mural at the Xizhimen stop--or rather, part of it. It was big.

When I got where I was going, things were pretty dead because of the holiday. I had dinner at one of the ubiquitous KFCs. It started to rain, and then there was a tremendous thunderstorm. and then sat under some eaves in front of a strip of quiet restaurants, watching the rain fall and listening to recordings of my darling's philosophy 100 lectures. He is such a brilliant fellow.

At 9, I bumbled around several buildings (the directions were imprecise) until I found the right place. It's nice being able to talk, which is something I think several times a day. I may not talk elegantly, but I can at least ask questions and get answers. The party was barely started. I talked for some time with an almost-PhD who is studying the Chinese zither. He was the only one my age. Everyone else who gradually showed up seemed extremely young. Some FBers were recent grads or a couple years out of college, but others were people in the language program at Beida who were probably just doing a junior year abroad. What kids they were. Here is a picture of some people sitting around, including the zither guy (on the couch).

After a while, we started playing a complicated game involving staying in rhythm whilst shouting out animal names and performing a complex series of hand gestures. Photos below, though I didn't capture any of the funniest moments. I was too busy playing. You had to be an animal that had a hand-gesture to go with it. Then you'd say your own animal and somebody else's (with the hand gestures). They had to say their own animal and somebody else's, etc., all without ever missing a beat. (The beat was pat-pat clap, introduced as being the beat from Queen's "We Will Rock You.") Ah party games. What would we do without them. I was: mosquito, cobra, and rhinoceros. Mosquito was the cleverest, with a biting gesture. A party-crashing NYC consultant only in China for a week, who was sitting next to me (not pictured), was an ant-eater, also pretty clever. (In manner he was very like my ex KR, which was amusing.)



Time passed very quickly and soon it was midnight. I worried that the coach would turn to a pumpkin and my cheery finery to rags, so I decided to leave--though the party was very much in full swing by then. Having got up before 7, though, I was feeling distinctly pumpkiny and ragged. I said my goodbyes and walked out along the little lane where the FBer lived. The rain had cleared the low clouds away, so I actually got a sight of the full mid-autumn moon from which the holiday takes its inspiration: roundness, fullness, the completeness of a family circle, the big clear moon. Walking down the lane alone at midnight, I attempted a couple pictures of the bright little moon, but my hand wasn't steady enough and the pictures came out all lumpity and more like a collocation of 2 or 3 separate individual moons. It figures. Well, using long exposure effects and turning the unsteady hand to my advantage, I at least got this cool picture of a neon internet café sign. A trite effect, I know, but it's fun to actually produce it.


The subway closes at 11:30 here so I got a cab back. The cab driver was sleepy and irritable, but I got home fine. I had never been out so late. The gate I usually go in was locked, so I had to go around the other side. There was no sign of the bored elevator girls. I was very tired by the time I turned the key of my little room, but it was nice to spend the holiday with low-stress lively people, even if it wasn't actually especially fun or fulfilling.

My pick for favorite news story today (I'm going to start adding this as a regular feature I think): Photos from Mars! I love how the little rovers just keep on ticking, outliving their expiration date by a factor or ten and more. And the light in the non-false-color photos is truly "unworldly."